Congration! You Done It!

This is going to be a packed month.

For one thing, we're moving at the end of June. We'll be heading back to Colorado, where my husband and I were both raised. This is both good news and bad--good because our families are there, and they mostly like us, and bad because moving sucks, especially when you're crossing a third of the country. Driving one of those big trucks while towing a car is basically my worst driving nightmare (I'm a nervous driver--too many accidents because of other peoples' mistakes. Teenage boys fiddling with the radio, I'm glaring at you.). 

Moving means packing, of course. And cleaning. Which is the sort of thing that can definitely be done in a month, except for the fact that both my husband and I are sort of career-having at the moment, and our careers sometimes take up a lot of time.

My husband is in the final stages of getting his Ph.D, which means he's running around half-panicked trying to finish his dissertation and preparing for graduation and setting up his defense. There's booze in the evenings these days, but because he's a lightweight, his commitment to abusing alcohol is shaky at best, so that typically means two or three hard cider bottles to recycle in the morning and a few tipsily-sent pictures of fuzzy baby animals to wade through in my email because he knows I like those.

Finally, according to my schedule, I need to have my first draft done by June 30th or risk missing my deadline, and right now, that's looking easier said than done. It takes time to put together a comprehensible draft, even a first one, and my betas deserve more than a bunch of pages of nonsense interspersed with lines of text that say "INSERT FIGHT SCENE HERE. IT'S GONNA BE SUPER DRAMATIC. YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE IT. ONCE I'VE WRITTEN IT. WHICH I HAVEN'T YET. OBVIOUSLY. THANKS, BYEEEE."

I'm also supposed to be doing promotion for Loose Cannon, and blogging and tweeting and, well, none of that stuff comes particularly naturally to me, so it's all sort of a stressful mess at the moment. I love talking to readers, truly,  but I'm always worried that I'm going to say something that reveals how deeply un-cool I am, and that's, well, a bit nerve-wracking unless I've had a lot of caffeine.

Plus the Stanley Cup Final isn't over yet, and let's be honest, short of homelessness, nothing's getting me to turn that TV off early. 

I feel like I'm complaining. That wasn't my intention. I was aiming for more of a whiny vibe, you know? Hmm. Note to self: practice whining.

So to some it up, let me just say that I am busy as a bee, and I would welcome any volunteers who are willing to 1) do my job for me, 2) pack up my house and 3) shepherd me across state lines in some measure of luxury. Any takers? No?

Sigh. Being an author is hard. (A-HA! Nailed that whine perfectly!).

This is the cake equivalent of what my draft will look like if I don't budget my time well.